Classic Movie Articles

Everything you knew about cinema is probably wrong; BFI
releases definitive list of of the top 100 most-seen films

by
Nick James, Editor, Sight and Sound

The British Film Institute, 27 November 2004

The Ultimate Film Chart reveals that the British really love British
films! Can this really be true? Haven't the British always preferred
Hollywood films?

Think again. Box-office figures dominate most discussions about films
in the UK, with massive US blockbuster success as the story the media have
been telling us for years. But now we can say it isn't so. Of course the
most famous Hollywood successes like Gone with the Wind and
Star Wars are at the top of any list, but what if I tell you that
Spring in Park Lane (1948), a star vehicle for the British actress
Anna Neagle with an 'upstairs downstairs' social class plot directed by
her husband Herbert Wilcox, is up there with them? Surely not?

Well, yes it is. And we know now because a new survey conducted by the
British Film Institute for Channel 4 suggests that much we thought we knew
about cinema tastes in Britain is wrong. The new Ultimate Film Chart
places Spring in Park Lane precisely as the fifth biggest film in
the UK of all time. How is this possible?

Box-office top 100s are usually based on statistics gathered only since
the 1970s, but this new chart, compiled using the best means and sources
available to assess cinema admissions before the 1970s -- as well as those
since -- has radically redrawn the top 100 in favour of British films. For
instance, you'll find an astonishing three more Anna Neagle vehicles in
the top 50 - at No.17 is The Courteneys of Curzon Street (1947), at
No.42 Piccadilly Incident (1946), and at No.49 I Live in
Grosvenor Square (1945), making Neagle possibly the most successful
cinema actress in British film history.

And this Brit rediscovery is not just a one-woman phenomenon. Take
Margaret Lockwood and James Mason
in the highwayman costume romp The Wicked Lady (1946): it's up at
ninth, just below Titanic, or another
Mason vehicle The Seventh
Veil (1945), which just beats Harry Potter and the Philosopher's
Stone to the tenth spot. Another one-time matinee idol, Dirk Bogarde,
can be found playing a cockney killer at No.29 in The Blue Lamp
(1950) outclassing the likes of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
-- which doesn't even make it into the top 100!

So how did Channel 4 and the BFI come to this revelation? The fact that
cinema admissions reached an all time high in the 1940s, just before the
advent of home television, aroused BFI researchers' curiosity as to how
the biggest films then would compare to recent big successes. In the peak
year of 1946, there were 1,638 million admissions, which had declined to
just 54 million by 1984, to be helped back to around 176 million through
the multiplex revolution by 2002 -- still a mere fraction of that 1946
figure. It was obvious therefore, that the popular cinema of the 1940s far
outstripped much of today's -- although there were vastly more titles
being distributed then, so the comparative difference is not as great as
the overall admission figures suggest.

In the absence of straightforward box-office data it was important to
draw on as many reliable sources as exist to assess the probable
box-office figures for pre-1970s films. In pre-video and -DVD days, there
was a lot more repeat viewing of films -- news items about middle aged
ladies watching Gone with the Wind
or The Sound of
Music for a record umpteenth time appeared regularly. And just a
glance at the subject matter of Anna Neagle blockbusters tells you that
the pre-television audience for film in the UK was not dominated by
teenage boys but by older women.

None the less there's an over-riding impression of a consistent
preference for British subject matter throughout the whole list. Out of
all the top 30 films one could, at a push, claim around half as having
British subject matter (assuming you allow the likes of Harry Potter,
The Lord of the Rings and Mary Poppins
as British-originated subjects). What does that say to a British film
industry that's always trying to imitate the Americans? Perhaps they would
do better to try to tempt that older female audience back into the cinema
with British subjects and matinee idols like Jude Law. Except that that's
what Hollywood is doing these days.

There's also a definite showing for the British film-makers who
dominate critics best-ever polls such as the one Sight & Sound runs
every ten years. Carol Reed's The Third Man, which did best of all
the Brit films in Sight & Sound's 2002 poll and also won the BFI's
100 Best British Films poll in 1999 is at No.26 here (and his Oliver!
is at No.74). David Lean has
two films, Dr. Zhivago at No.44, and Lawrence of Arabia at
No.85. Michael Powell, who figures so strongly in critics' polls with such
idiosyncratic works as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, is at
No.63 here with his rather tame 49th Parallel. But perhaps the biggest
surprise is that the great
Alfred Hitchcock's
one and only entry in the list is his adaptation of Rebecca, at No.73.